Wells Fargo demotes execs in retail-banking shakeup

Wells Fargo fired 5,300 employees over a five-year period for creating fake accounts in order to hit internal goals.

Wells Fargo & Co. took further steps this week to restructure its retail-banking business, even as the firm continues digging into the causes of its sales-practices scandal, according to employees and memos reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Some senior executives within the retail bank were demoted or had their responsibilities curtailed, according to one memo sent to employees Tuesday. This followed the firing in recent weeks of other executives as Wells Fargo WFC, +0.57% continues to address the scandal that erupted last fall after it emerged that employees opened as many as 2.1 million accounts without customers’ knowledge.

Mary Mack, who took over the embattled retail-banking unit in July, wrote in a memo Tuesday that she was reorganizing groups within the business to expand its focus on roughly 6,000 branches across the U.S. The retail bank oversees about 78,000 employees and serves around 40 million retail-banking customers.

Mack wrote in the memo, reviewed by the Journal, that while the bank has taken a number of steps to rebuild trust with customers and employees, there is still more work to do. That includes “changes in leadership and how our organization is structured,” she wrote.

The “SHE” ETF allows everyday people to invest in companies with strong female leadership. It is based on recent data that suggests companies with a high representation of women in the executive ranks outperform their male-dominated peers.

Also popular on WSJ.com:

Ivanka Trump’s landlord is a Chilean billionaire sued the U.S. government.